The Quartz Massacre

by Rebecca Levene

  After a few minutes, as the wreckage of the coastal base disappeared behind them, Venus turned to smile at him. Her white hair was mussed and stained with the blood of the Nort she'd bayoneted. There were black flecks of it freckling her face. Her body gave off a strong odour of sweat and adrenaline. Rogue thought she looked more beautiful than anything he'd ever seen. He felt his heart rate speed up and his mouth dry and hoped that there was no sensor in Helm that could detect it.

  "Well, looks like we made it," Venus said. She began to clean her nails with her knife, taking care not to look at him. "I'd say you and me make a good team."

  Rogue thought so too, but didn't say it. "Don't relax too much, Venus," he said. "My gut tells me this ain't over by a long way."

  NINE

  HELL ON WHEELS

  The hovertrain sped on into the stark desert frontier of the continent. Here the chem was thinner, but it didn't bring relief, just allowed the two suns to burn down all the brighter onto the people below, emitting levels of radiation that could be fatal after only a few minutes' unsuited exposure.

  Rogue's skin was designed to withstand the suns as well as the air of Nu Earth, but even he found it hot. The air was choked with dust too, thrown up by the hyper-fast passage of the train. It seemed crazy that this barren, changeless landscape was something men would kill and die over. But then Nu Earth had never been valuable for what was on it, only for where it was - near the crucial hyperspace gateway that the black hole above it supplied. Everything on the planet's surface was just collateral damage, all the great cities that had been built up here, the hopeful places that colonists had intended as a reminder of home. It was all rubble now. When the war was over, Rogue imagined Nu Earth remaining empty, a prize that no one wanted any longer.

  His radio crackled into life, jerking him out of his thoughts. He wasn't very surprised to hear Kovert's voice on the other end. "Rogue, I'm monitoring your progress. You saved a lot of lives today, GI."

  "Get to the point, colonel," Rogue snapped.

  Again, he heard the smile in the other man's voice, as if Rogue was behaving just the way he expected. "You're not out of this yet, trooper. Now that Nu Atlanta's fallen, the Norts are massing ahead for their main attack on Harpo's Ferry. It's our last stronghold on the continent and it's crucial for us to keep control of it. If you can get there on time-"

  A roar of gunfire cut off the sound of the colonel's voice, seeming to echo endlessly through the dry desert air. Rogue squinted over the high sides of the open-air carriage and saw what looked at first like a regiment of miniature sandstorms heading towards the train. After a moment they resolved themselves into figures, the grotesque two-legged shape of stammels powering through the sand towards the train. The wind carried the sound of their riders towards him, a high uncanny ululation. Then the first pinpricks of fire appeared against the distant figures and Rogue heard a scream as a Souther beside him was taken through the forehead by a high-speed projectile round.

  "Sorry, colonel," he said into his radio. "Like you said, we're not out of this yet." He switched off the signal before Kovert could reply and turned to the Souther squad beside him. "Get everyone forward to the front of the train."

  The Southers hesitated a moment, then obeyed, confident in Rogue's leadership. He hoped their confidence wasn't misplaced. He could see the sharp spikes of gun turrets on the carriage ahead, along with the bulkier form of an AA gun. "Come on," he shouted at Venus, and leapt over the dividing wall and into the next carriage.

  Before his feet had even landed, a ball of Lazooka fire consumed the place where he'd been standing, incinerating the other carriage and all the Southers still on it.

  The main thing about stammels, Pietr had discovered, was that they stank. He needed to press his knees tight into the mottle-skinned beast to keep his seat as it lolloped over the desert sand on its two stocky legs, but he hated being that close to it. He imagined its stench seeping greasily from its skin and through his chem suit. It wasn't that fanciful an idea. If the smell was detectable through the chem mask's filters, it must be unbelievably strong.

  The beast was closer to the train, galloping in a group of six, the other riders so close that Pietr felt he could have reached out and touched them. But he didn't. He was concentrating on sucking his chest in, trying to make himself seem as small and lithe as possible. It wasn't until after he'd stolen a stammel from the holding pens and ridden off with the legion towards the train that he'd realised that every single one of the other riders was female.

  Fortunately, none of them could spare the time to look at him too closely. The train was huge, the largest mechanical thing Pietr had ever seen. The stammels stood a good fifteen feet high, but Pietr still felt like they were fleas trying to suck the blood out of a dinosaur. Beside him, he saw one of the stammel riders raise a rifle to her shoulder and shoot off a round at the train, still a good hundred metres away from them. It seemed entirely futile, but, carrying with startling loudness through the desert air, he heard a scream, and a tiny body fell from the train to the sand below.

  The other riders all raised their rifles in the air, letting out an ululating cry of triumph more frightening than the scream. Pietr raised his rifle too. As soon as he did, his precarious balance deserted him and he suddenly felt himself sliding rapidly backwards down the long tail of the stammel.

  It was what saved him. The round of return fire from the train passed exactly through where his body had been and took the rider behind him instead. With a desperate scramble, he was able to pull himself back onto the creature. As soon as he had the reins he pulled them sharply left, dragging the creature away from the terrifying hail of machine gun fire churning the sand beneath its double-hooved feet.

  The machine gun fire seemed to follow him. He could see where it was coming from now, a central carriage on the train, and inside it what looked like a fleck of blue, a drop of water in a sea of sand. Pietr realised that the fire was going high, aiming for the bulk of the riders behind him. The arc was taking it closer and closer to him. The only way out was under and back, through the curtain of bullets.

  Deliberately this time, he repeated his earlier manoeuvre, sliding backwards and down the tail of his stammel. His chem suit scraped against the spines on the creature's back and for one horrible second he thought it was going to tear, but the stammel rider's suit he'd stolen was designed to withstand its mount's skin and the material held.

  As soon as he had a firm grip, Pietr twisted his foot forward to kick it as hard as he could against the stammel's flank. For a moment it hesitated, as if not quite believing what he wanted it to do, but the creatures had been trained and bred for combat and it obeyed his command, however reluctantly.

  The bullets passed so close over Pietr's head that he heard their high-pitched wine and the miniature thunderclaps of the self-propelled incendiary rounds as they reached supersonic speed. If just one of them pierced the protective shell of his chem suit he would be finished.

  None of them did. After an endless stretch of time that probably only lasted two seconds, he was through the hail of fire and out the other side, in the clear, as the bullets hunted bigger prey, the big cluster of stammel riders he'd abandoned.

  He heard their battle shrieks turn into cries of pain as the hot metal found soft flesh, but he couldn't make himself care. He had to get to the train. He had to get to the man who was firing those bullets. Then everyone, every death, would be revenged.

  Rogue's gut instinct back at base had been right. The Norts weren't letting the hovertrain go easy. In fact, they weren't letting it go at all. The stammel riders were relentless, and no matter how many he mowed down with the train's flak guns, there was always another, and time after time a shot would ring out and a Souther would scream and that would be another one lost.

  "How many of them are there?" Venus shouted from the gun beside him as she sprayed fire into a cluster of riders who'd ventured too close to the train. The lead rider fell screaming, dragged alo
ng for yards behind her stammel by feet still hooked into its stirrups. The creature's dumb, big-lipped face looked up at them, meeting Rogue's eyes briefly with what looked almost like a quizzical frown, as if to ask him what it had ever done to deserve this.

  "You and me both, buddy," he wanted to say to it.

  "I'm picking up at least five hundred stammel bio-signs," Helm answered Venus's question. "You'd better be careful, V."

  "I can take care of myself!" she snapped at him, and Helm lapsed into wounded silence.

  "Err, Rogue," Bagman said. "I think you should look up."

  "Can't!" Rogue gritted. The nearest squadron of riders seemed to be carrying a Lazooka slung between their mounts. If they got off a round of that, the train could take some serious damage.

  "I really think you should look up," Bagman repeated.

  Rogue cursed and did as he asked, keeping his finger depressed on the machine gun's trigger as he risked a glance up at the sky. Then he cursed again.

  Circling elegantly in the breeze, high above the train but getting lower, were the unmistakable silhouettes of gliders. The suns emerged briefly from their concealing clouds and the underwings of the gliders flashed a vivid scarlet and yellow, like a hornet. Beneath the brightly coloured canopy, the men were barely visible.

  Nort Sun Legions. Damn it! Those guys carried bombs, big ones. He couldn't afford to have them start dropping on the train.

  "Cover the stammels," he shouted over to Venus. "I'm gonna take care of the flyers."

  "Roger that," Venus said.

  "There's a Lazooka unit at eleven o'clock," Rogue told her as he scrambled across the carriage to the big AA-gun. "Better take that out first."

  "Teach your grandmother," Venus shot back, but she sounded amused rather than irritated. A burst of flack was already raking across the stammels hefting the Lazooka between them. Rogue just had time to see them stumble and fall, their bestial faces looking stupidly surprised, and then all his attention was fixed on the skies.

  The sun legionaries should have made nice clear targets with their garish wings and wide silhouettes, but they were coming in with the suns behind them and suddenly the colouring of their gliders made sense, camouflaged and almost invisible against the glaring light. Rogue would have liked to just let loose across the whole sky with A-A fire, but he knew that ammo was short. He couldn't afford to give their position away without taking the enemies out.

  By the time his eyes had adjusted to the blinding glare of the sunlight, one bomb had already been let loose. He felt the explosion before he heard it, rocking the train from side to side on its tracks so that for one moment Rogue thought it might come off them altogether. There was another explosion only a second after, a Lazooka round this time. Without him as back-up it looked like Venus was struggling to keep the stammel riders contained. A few more hits like that and the train wouldn't be making it anywhere. He could already hear the engine juddering, a catch in its rhythm as one of its pistons failed to fire.

  He shot down one sun trooper, the falling figure twirling and twirling as it fell like a sycamore seed, then another, but there were always more and they were low enough to be deploying their payloads now. It was only a matter of time before the train took a critical hit. Amazingly, he saw salvation ahead. In the distance, but rapidly approaching, was the mouth of a tunnel, a blackness in the mountains ahead, gaping like a mouth to consume the endless desert sand. If he could hold the Norts off that long, they might make it. If.

  Right up until the moment he grasped the metal strut of the train and heaved himself from the back of his stammel, Pietr didn't think he was going to make it. Even then, he was left hanging by only one arm, his feet dangling far too near to the ground. At the speed the train was travelling, he knew that any contact with the coarse sand would scrape the chem suit and then the skin and flesh right off him.

  Jaze had always told him that he was weak, but as he pulled himself inch by painful inch onto the low-level platform skirting the bottom of the train, he found that strength was something you could find when you needed it.

  Once he was on the hard metal surface he lay on his back for a few minutes, gasping for breath, staring up at the sun through the polarised lenses of his chem suit. He was alive. It had seldom felt this good. He breathed in a deep breath of stale air, then heard the footstep just a few feet to the side of him, and kept the air in his lungs, frozen, until the pressure of it was too much and he had to let it out in as soft a hiss as he could manage.

  A Souther. His first instinct was to hide, to lay low until the trooper had passed. But he realised that he was going to have to pass through a whole train full of them. In Nort uniform there was no way he was going to make it. He was going to need a Souther uniform. Which meant he was going to have to kill this Souther. More than that, he was going to have to kill him without doing any damage to his chem suit.

  The Souther's footsteps came closer. Then they paused, as if he was listening. For a desperate moment, Pietr thought he had heard the soft whisper of the spent air venting from his air tanks. He braced himself, ready to grab the man if he came nearer and fling him from the side of the train.

  The man didn't come and Pietr realised that he could hear another sound, louder than the breath of air from his suit. It was the very gentle whine of tiny motors. It was, he realised, the sound of auto-binocs finding their focus.

  Which meant the Souther wasn't looking at him. Even better, it meant that the Souther was looking away from the train, through devices which would cut out his peripheral vision entirely.

  There would never be a better time than this. Before the fear Pietr felt gripping his gut could paralyse him completely, he eased himself to his knees and then to his feet.

  The Souther was close to him, closer than he'd realised, less than two feet away. It seemed impossible that he wouldn't see him. The green-clad upright figure didn't move. The binocs remained pressed against the clear plastic at the front of his chem mask.

  He was standing very close to the edge. Pietr would have to be careful that any move he made didn't send the man tumbling from the train. Clearly, as if it had only happened yesterday, he remembered his basic training. Cruel, miserable old Sergeant Gillash taking the raw recruits through all the ways one man could kill another man. "You're going to be Kashans," he'd said to them. "The best of the best. Other soldiers need a weapon to kill. Kashans can do it with their bare hands." Then he'd taken the neck of the Souther prisoner and snapped it with one clean twist.

  Pietr didn't let himself think about it. He kept his mind in the past, in a time when this was just training, put his hands around the dull metal of the Souther's helmet - and jerked.

  Even through the chem suit, he heard the soft snap. The body went instantly limp in his arms, far heavier than he'd guessed it would be. It took a moment's fierce struggle to heave it away from the edge of the train. Now all he needed to do was find an airlocked section where he could change from one chem suit to the other without exposing himself to Nu Earth's toxic atmosphere. Grimly, he began to drag the corpse towards the nearest door.

  The tunnel was only a hundred metres ahead of them. Fifty. Rogue let off a final salvo at a low-flying squadron of sun troops as Venus sprayed metal into the nearest stammels, and then they were through.

  It got worse. The tunnel had looked tiny in the distance, hardly big enough for the train to fit through. All wrong. It was huge, larger than the train by far.

  Large enough to allow a squadron of Hoppas to fly down after the train. Large enough for them to carry on pursuing it as it rushed at breathtaking speeds round the looping twists and curves of the tunnel's length.

  "Give me a break!" Bagman said. "Don't these guys ever give up?"

  "Not fair!" Gunnar said. "When am I ever going to see some action?"

  Rogue fired into the Hoppas, taking one down, but one of the others had already dropped its payload of Nort troops onto the train behind him. "Right about now," he said to Gunnar. The tun
nel twisted sharply to the left, forcing the Hoppas to drop back for a moment, and he used the time to snatch Gunnar from his back and set him up on his tripod on the deck beside him. "Watch my back," said Rogue. "I'm gonna take care of those Hoppas."

  "Norts to kill and I even get to decide which ones to take out for myself. Life is good," Gunnar said, already firing into the approaching troops. The hail of fire tore them to shreds, scattering their bright remains over the dull metal of the train. But there were more where they came from, and more Hoppas too.

  Even with Venus beside him, Rogue was barely able to keep the Hoppas from blowing the train out from under him. Only the twisting of the tunnel saved him, stopping the Hoppa captains from ever getting a good lock. After a while, it stopped being about reflexes and started being about psychology.

  Take that Hoppa: the pilot liked taking risks, liked zooming in just before a tunnel turn, hoping that Rogue's attention would be away, thinking he was already safe. The next time the train flung itself round a bend Rogue was ready. He sent fire ahead of him, to where he knew the Hoppa was going to be, and it flew straight into it, blooming into a ball of fire.

  Then there was the pilot of that Hoppa there. He wasn't too brave, liked to hang back behind the others and let them take the damage, then dart in and shoot his missiles when Rogue's attention was elsewhere. Rogue sent a round powering through the two forward Hoppas to take out the one lurking behind.

  Hoppa after Hoppa, with Venus meting out death of her own beside him, and still the train dove on through the tunnel, swimming through solid rock.

  Then, distantly, Rogue began to see a lighter circle against the grey, as small as a coin. A second later it disappeared, only to reappear again, a fraction bigger this time. The end of the tunnel. They were nearly through.